Digital Humanities Seminar: The Case for Slow Digitisation

Digital Humanities Lab seminar series. Professor Andrew Prescott (Glasgow): ‘The Case for Slow Digitisation’. For many libraries, museums and archives, digitisation has become a matter of optimising workflows and maximising digital coverage of the collections. The number of pages digitised has become a key performance indicator, and matter of pride, for many institutions. However, a production line approach to digitisation runs the risk of producing deceptive surrogates which omit key features of the object digitised. Much of our digitisation is little better than colour microfilming, notwithstanding recent initiatives such as the International Image Interoperability Framework. It will be suggested that we need to slow down, develop more imaginative approaches, and start approaching manuscripts and books as if they are archaeological artefacts, whose story may be uncovered slowly over a long period with a range of technology. Such a ‘slow digitisation’ approach has many parallels with the ‘slow scholarship’ movement and maybe one way whereby Digital Humanities can promote a more humanistic culture in the academy.